Po'Boys and Poets

Join us for an afternoon filled with delicious po'boys and inspiring poetry. Curated annually by Stacey Balkun, this year's lineup of poets includes Adam Clay, FreeQuency, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, and Leona Sevick.

Ticket price includes a po'boy buffet.

The Andre Callioux Center for Performing Arts and Cultural Justice is accessible to community members who require mobility-related ADA accommodations. Parking near the venue is free, though somewhat limited. The nearest RTA stop is at N. Broad and Columbus.

MEET THE POETS

Stacey Balkun is the author of Sweetbitter & co-editor of Fiolet & Wing. Winner of the 2019 New South Writing Contest, her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Mississippi Review, Pleiades, & several other anthologies & journals. Stacey holds a PhD from University of Mississippi, Oxford and an MFA from Fresno State. She lives and writes in New Orleans.

Adam Clay's most recent book is Circle Back (Milkweed Editions, 2024). His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Denver Quarterly, Tin House, Bennington Review, Georgia Review, Boston Review, jubilat, Iowa Review, and elsewhere. He received a Literary Arts Fellowship from the Mississippi Arts Commission in 2018. For twenty years, he co-edited Typo Magazine, a journal of poetry and poetics. He directs the Creative Writing program at Louisiana State University.

www.FreeQuencySpeaks.com | story|teller, organizer, host, workshop leader, chaos collagist, youth worker & performance artist, FreeQuency is a gender-renegade Kenyan e|immigrant who is masculine off center, femme adjacent, an AunTea and|or a prettyboi. FreeQuency’s anti-disciplinary work interrogates and occupies the in between while exploring the nuances and stark contradictions of existence under racialized capitalism. This humanoid is the 2018 Women of the World Poetry Slam Champion, the founder of Paza Sauti: Kenya & has been featured in or written for numerous outlets. Their work has amassed over 2 million views online including a TED talk that almost didn't get released.

Maurice Carlos Ruffin is the author of National Bestseller, The American Daughters, as well as The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You, a One Book One New Orleans selection, which was longlisted for the Story Prize. His debut, We Cast a Shadow, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the PEN America Open Book Prize. All three books were New York Times Editor’s Choice selections. Ruffin is the winner of the Iowa Review Award in fiction and the Louisiana Writer Award. Ruffin is an associate professor of Creative Writing at Louisiana State University.

Leona Sevick’s work appears in Orion, Birmingham Poetry Review, Blackbird, The Southern Review, and The Sun. She was a 2018 Tennessee Williams Scholar and a 2019 Walter E. Dakin Fellow for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and she serves as advisory board member of the Furious Flower Black Poetry Center. She has been supported by residencies at The Hambidge Center and Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Leona is provost and professor of English at Bridgewater College in Virginia, where she teaches Asian American literature (she is an Asian American poet and essayist). She is the 2017 Press 53 Poetry Award Winner for her first full-length book of poems, Lion Brothers. Her new book of poems, The Bamboo Wife, was published in July 2024 by Trio House Press.

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